30 July 2020 marked 1000 days since the arrest of Jagtar Singh Johal, a British national, accused of being involved in a spate of targeted killings in Punjab in 2016 and 2017. Jagtar was a resident of Dumbarton, a town in Scotland.
Three years ago, in November 2017, Jagtar’s brother in Scotland received a call from his wife, Gurpreet Kaur, telling him that her husband had been forcibly taken away. A month earlier, in October, Jagtar and his family had arrived in Punjab for his wedding. While the family returned to Scotland after the wedding, Jagtar and Kaur stayed on in India.
On 4 November 2017, while the couple were out shopping in the Rama Mandi town in Punjab’s Jalandhar district, the police appeared and arrested Jagtar. Kaur told me that a group of men suddenly descended on the scene, forcibly pulled Jagtar out of the car, and took him away. “I couldn’t make sense of anything,” she said. “I cried and cried.”
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